Rayson Tan via Unsplash
As soon as we find ourselves living, we find ourselves not only among things but among men, not only on earth, but also in society. And those men, that society into which we have fallen by the process of being alive, already has its repertory of ideas, of ruling convictions about the universe…Without realizing it, we find ourselves installed in that network of ready-made solutions for the problems of our lives.
-Jose Ortega y Gasset
I am not the wise old fish.
-David Foster Wallace
Growing up, like every other kid, I loved summer. Summer was the chance to be outside, leave the house or my town, and not have every moment prefilled and accounted for. Summer in America is romantic, for the weather, the fun, and the places, but most importantly for the freedom. Being out of school promised long stretches of unstructured time which allow for endless possibility but also just feel good by themselves.
But these opportunities always seemed just beyond reach. My parents, in their loving and severe attentiveness, kept my schedule packed with carefully coordinated camps, sports, and activities. Their favorite words for the things I needed were “structure” and that I needed to do something “productive.” My favorite weeks of summer were often those in between these formal events of some duration, when I could enjoy time utterly unanchored from responsibility. Being a kid helps with this.
I often feel like no one ever says anything out loud. We’re just supposed to infer answers to big questions from our surroundings. We pick these things up as we go along without bothering to investigate or critically examine them. No one sits you down and tells you how to live life. There’s no instructor that knocks on your door when you turn 12 and says: “producing and self-improvement are good. Idleness is bad. Freedom is sweeter when it’s not always available. You need to be making yourself more powerful and attractive.” But one takes these things in all the same. And one often treasures them all the more strongly for their ambiguity.
I’m not talking about the tangible direction of one’s life here, the actual decisions about what to do, which subjects to study, which hobbies and activities to pursue, which specific relationships to cultivate, what kind of job to seek, and so forth. I’m talking about the conditions that bound these decisions, the prevailing logic that implicitly reigns over every whim, impulse, desire, and satisfaction. Hopefully one spends at least some time considering how to live life, but the why of we end up choosing as we do can stretch out beyond the horizon of deliberate consideration. This leads to both frustration and illumination when we go to excavate our own beliefs. We can’t usually point to a didactic moment, a great lecture we received, or a critical mentor, because they don’t exist in any kind of discrete way. Rather, the accumulated memory and experience of a billion tiny moments coalesces into something intangible that sticks with us, even as this coalescence shoves us into painful corners.
Of course, my parents were right. Too much free time, and I likely would’ve gotten into even more trouble than I already managed to. I’m definitely a better athlete, and I’m more adaptable and comfortable in new situations and talking to different people. I went to a better college than I otherwise would’ve. The problem is, even if they had been wrong, I’m not sure I’d ever know it. Once these tiny moments crystallize into values, I can’t escape them. They’re not somehow facts that can be altered or reasoned into or out of. They’re much deeper, like love or hunger, and won’t simply fall before my will.
When I’ve had issues with anxiety or depression or fear, I’m usually able to convince myself of my own irrationality or my willingness to think – or at least act – differently. I’m perfectly capable of healthy self-talk, even if I rarely practice it. I’m great at explaining my emotional dissonance and convincing myself that it just shouldn’t exist. This is a superficial conviction, however. Just because I know my fear makes no sense doesn’t mean it goes away. Even if some difficult task is rationally achievable, it becomes no less daunting in my mind. My experiences interrogating my values are the same. I can’t escape them. They’re always with me, even if I think they’re stupid, flawed, or somehow holding me back.
If I remove myself from “productivity” and “structure,” even when I take action that should feel emancipatory, I remain stuck within them. Living contrary to deeply held mores can often result, for me at least, in momentary flight that results in something like freedom but brings along baggage of guilt and shame. In trying to redefine myself, to create my own reality, I’ve somehow at the same time betrayed myself. No amount of thinking can relieve me of my own psychic and spiritual burden. This can make me feel trapped.
This transmission and direction obviously isn’t coming just from my parents. They’re human too, a fact I realized far too late in life, and just as subject to the ever-accreting cascade of value-forming moments as anyone else, and naturally would pass on their own values to me and my siblings. Like all parents should, they wanted the best for us, and we live in a world where parents who dream of conventionally successful children feel compelled to get them into after school programs starting in kindergarten. My point is that defining “the best for our children” or even “conventionally successful” doesn’t happen in a vacuum, even for our herculean parents. Attempting to independently, radically define these ideas could feel like setting kids up for failure rather than liberating them from restrictive norms.
So I don’t blame these challenges on summer camp. I think struggling to reconcile your life with your values, while simultaneously trying to influence and guide both, is just part of what it means to be human. I can’t lay that at the feet of any person. At the same time, not all of this is concrete. There’s plenty of plasticity in those more childish and fleeting values which are easily identified in hindsight. When I was 14, I was obsessed with the ephemeral social capital captured in the concept of being cool, or as we called it, being “chill.” I flatter myself I’ve transcended that. When I was 19, I wanted to embody punishing masculinity manifested through physical strength, for the sidewalks to crack beneath my feet when I walked. I’ve definitely left that behind. I’ll never bench press as much as I did. My back hurts less though.
So of course, we aren’t trapped. Freedom is a real thing. There are obviously a great many socially-emergent values that are worth leaving behind: any kind of racial or gender supremacy, the instinct to gratuitous punishment, a vision of politics as a zero-sum contest of competing interests. I still believe in reconsidering the roles of structure and productivity, especially as they are manifested in the more extreme versions of hustle culture and careerism. My point is that it’s worth extending grace to ourselves and others during the renegotiation of what we believe in. It’s impossible to fully leave our values behind, even as we try to assert new ones.
Because as we try new ways of living, or talk ourselves into new beliefs, we come up against real restriction and limitation. I have a friend who despises productivity culture - the idea that he has to work, forever, at a job he presumably hates. That his person is defined by his work. That without a job he is somehow a failure. Certainly, most rational people might agree that we shouldn’t have to justify our own existence economically just to survive. But raging against this particular “injustice” is going to leave one without money and a comfortable place to live, cut them off from fruitful relationships, and ultimately starve them of the very freedom they crave. Even if that fight is worth fighting, smashing a rejection of productivity norms against the brick wall of reality might lead one to very different conclusions than they began with.
People experiment with living in all kinds of ways, but good reasoning and healthy self-talk don’t guarantee success. Living like a hippie has come and gone. Two parent households seem to make sense. Keeping a steady, “normal” job seems practically to be a requirement. You can move around a lot but probably need to settle somewhere eventually. You probably need at least some combination of family, friends, hobbies, career, and physical activity. Recognizing all this makes me feel less free, but gives me structure. Likewise, self-improvement, striving, and productivity are what gives us a reason to keep going. However frustrating, however irrational and defeating and raining, getting up and chipping away at the uncarved block of life’s sculpture is the only way to not feel stuck, even if we never reach a destination.
Your writing for some reason reminded me of Kafka’s diary entries reminiscing about how his upbringing effected him
He writes the same thought more than 3-4 times, each time expanding on it.
https://harpers.org/archive/2023/04/revisionists-history/
There is also his scathing letter to his father which is a whole other story
https://images.pcmac.org/Uploads/Bellevue/Bellevue/Departments/DocumentsSubCategories/Documents/letter-to-my-father.pdf
Well stated and thoughtfully considered! The amorphous pressures that shape us are complex and mapping them dispassionately is a worthwhile exercise.